[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 120 (Thursday, September 12, 2013)] [House] [Pages H5542-H5545] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] THE INVESTIGATIONS OF CONGRESS The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) for 30 minutes. Mr. GOHMERT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are a couple of issues that are certainly worth elaborating on today. One is codified in The Wall Street Journal article from September 11, yesterday, and 7:35 p.m. is when it's timed out. It's regarding IRS Supervisor Lois Lerner. The article is entitled ``Lois Lerner's Own Words.'' The article reads: Congress' investigation into the IRS targeting of conservatives has been continuing out of the Syria headlines, and it's turning up news. Emails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee between former director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner and her staff raise doubts about IRS claims that the targeting wasn't politically motivated and that low-level employees in Cincinnati masterminded the operation. In a February 2011 email, Ms. Lerner advised her staff, including then Exempt Organizations technical manager Michael Seto and then Rulings and Agreements director Holly Paz, that a Tea Party matter is ``very dangerous'' and is something ``counsel and Lerner adviser Judy Kindell need to be in on.'' Ms. Lerner adds, ``Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.'' That's a different tune than the IRS sang in May when former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller said the Agency's overzealous enforcement was the work of two ``rogue'' employees in Cincinnati. When the story broke, Ms. Lerner suggested that her office had been unaware of the pattern of targeting until she read about it in the newspaper. ``So it was pretty much we started seeing information in the press that raised questions for us, and we went back and took a look,'' she said in May. Mr. Speaker, so no one misunderstands, it is a crime to give false information to Congress. The article goes on: Earlier this summer, IRS lawyer Carter Hull, who oversaw the review of many Tea Party cases and questionnaires, testified that his oversight began in April 2010. Tea Party cases under review are ``being supervised by Chip Hull at each step,'' Ms. Paz wrote to Ms. Lerner in a February 2011 email. ``He reviews info from TPs--or Tea Partys-- correspondence to TPs, et cetera. No decisions are going out of Cincy until we go all the way through the process with the (c)(3) and (c)(4) cases here.'' [[Page H5543]] The emails also put the targeting in the context of the media and congressional drumbeat over the impact of conservative campaign spending on the 2012 elections. On July 10, 2012, then Lerner adviser Sharon Light emailed Ms. Lerner a National Public Radio story on how outside money was making it hard for Democrats to hold their Senate majority. It certainly appears that the IRS was weaponized for the political purpose of one party, which would, of course, be one of the worst nightmares for the Founders of this country. Of course, George Washington didn't even want us to have political parties--he warned of the danger there--and here we are, all this time later, with a group of Democratic operatives who are doing things with the IRS that Richard Nixon could have only dreamed of doing. This article from The Wall Street Journal goes on: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had complained to the Federal Election Commission that conservative groups like Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity should be treated as political committees rather than 501(c)(4)s, which are tax-exempt social welfare groups that do not have to disclose their donors. ``Perhaps the FEC will save the day,'' Ms. Lerner wrote back later that morning. {time} 1315 Having been a district judge presiding over criminal cases, that is what you would call, Mr. Speaker, a statement against interests by Ms. Lerner in a prior communication that directly contradicts what she said the motivation was. I think there are criminal implications here that need to be followed up. In any event, the article goes on: That response suggests Ms. Lerner's political leanings, and it also raises questions about Ms. Lerner's intentions in a separate email exchange she had when an FEC investigator inquired about the status of the conservative group, the American Future Fund. The FEC and IRS don't have the authority to share that information under section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code. But the bigger question is: Why did they want to? After the FEC inquiry, the American Future Fund also got a questionnaire from the IRS. Again, that's from The Wall Street Journal dated last night. When one party in power in the executive branch can weaponize its Federal agencies against its political opponents, unless it is stopped, this little experiment in democracy will come to an end. It will bring about the very things that the Founders had hoped would not happen but were realistic enough to talk about them at some length about when and if we might move to one person being able to grasp control of the Federal Government. Of course, one of the things they used to try to keep that from happening was to give Congress the power of the purse, to give Congress oversight over the executive and judicial branches. When we've had Congress try to do oversight, whether it's over Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, we've met with nothing but blinded opaqueness--not transparency--from this administration. They have obfuscated constantly, done everything they can to prevent Congress from getting the truth about what they have called even phony scandals. If they're so phony, why don't you get the transparency out here, Mr. Speaker? Let's get people out here with the truth and then we can see fully whether or not they're phony scandals. The more this drip, drip, drip of information comes out, the more it becomes clear as to why this administration has been hiding evidence and attempting to keep Congress from discovering things. I have personally been pushing for many months now to have a special prosecutor investigate the Internal Revenue Service situation with regard to targeting for political purposes. The reason is that there are statutes that pertain to the IRS that could make some of this conduct potential crimes for which people could go to prison. I am so proud that I became a friend of Chuck Colson before he passed. I think he is one of the great Christian luminaries of the 20th and 21st centuries. His becoming a Christian all came about after his arrogance and his willful disobedience of the law during the Nixon administration brought him to prison. He had possession of information from the FBI about someone. As I recall, that got him about 1\1/2\ years in prison. Yet, we have seen during the close of the Clinton years as President, one man having, at the White House, about 1,000 FBI files. If he had been held to the same standard as Chuck Colson, he would never have gotten out of prison, but nobody went to prison. We've seen, as time has gone on and abuses within the executive branch have not been dealt with properly, the abuses have continued and gotten worse. From reports I hear from conservative groups, whether Tea Party, pro-Israel, pro-marriage, as it's been known throughout the history of mankind as being between a man and a woman, groups that just wanted the Constitution followed are all coming under attack--not all of the groups have, but most of the groups that have have been these type of groups--from the IRS. Then I hear from others who are being hit by inquiries from the FEC, not about Democratic matters, but about contributions to the Republican candidates and party. Then we hear that the EPA and other Federal agencies are going after conservatives. It is unbelievable how powerful this government has gotten and how dramatically it can affect the outcome of an election. We must make sure that these kinds of abuses stop. We have the power of the purse to stop it, and we should. If the administration is not going to be forthcoming with information about the IRS, then it may be necessary to defund part of the executive branch until such time as they become truthful. The Department of Justice still has not been forthcoming on information that in our Judicial Committee we've been trying to get. We still haven't gotten answers to all of the matters that ended up resulting in the Attorney General of the United States being held in contempt for failing and refusing to answer. It would seem that in the Fast and Furious scandal, where this administration saw to it that 2,000 or so guns made their way into the hands of drug cartels in Mexico, resulting in the loss of hundreds of lives in Mexico and at least one or more here in the United States, that someone should be held to account. When no one is held to account, when there is no accountability, the abuses get worse. That's what we're hearing. You would have thought once the IRS scandal had been exposed that people would be more cautious about going after conservative groups for political purposes. Since no one has been held accountable yet, no budgets cut, the arrogance and the political maneuvering within Federal agencies seems to be growing much worse. I'm hoping that my friends on the other side of the aisle will understand that the pendulum swings back and forth. I cannot imagine a single of my Democratic friends across the aisle being nearly as composed as we've been on the Republican side of the aisle about the abuses if the shoe were on the other foot and those abuses were over Democratic groups that were trying to elect the next Democratic President. If they were, I should be helping the Democrats and I would help the Democrats, because there's no place for an administration that weaponizes for political purposes the agencies under its control. We've gone for over 200 years fighting and doing what we could to avoid that happening, yet here it's happening. It is a Federal agency that I want to go to next that's been involved in carrying out the will of this administration. Here's an article from yesterday from Breitbart, written by John Sexton. He says: It has been nearly a year since the attack which killed four Americans in Benghazi. During that time, various minute- by-minute accounts of the attack have been published. In addition, the administration's decisions to refuse additional security requests and to revise its talking points after the attack have been examined in detail. Mr. Speaker, before I go on, I would like to grab a couple of posters. I would have felt good in life having Ty Woods and Glen Doherty covering my back, just as they were trying to do for the survivors for our American Government workers at our consulate in our annex in Benghazi. These are the four people we've lost: Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and our two former Navy seals, Ty Woods and Glen Doherty. They deserve the truth to come out. This article continues: But Benghazi may have been a case where most observers have missed the forest for the [[Page H5544]] trees. This is not an attempt to add new information so much as it is to collate the information that already exists from the most reputable journalistic sources. To begin with, Benghazi was a CIA operation involving weapons, one which had no cover beyond a small mission that provided a diplomatic fig leaf for the effort. Officially, the CIA was there to track and collect dangerous weapons left over from the war that ousted Qadhafi. But the evidence suggests that the CIA was also either tacitly or actively involved in a multinational effort to ship those weapons to Syrian rebels. Our covert effort in Benghazi, Libya, was connected to our escalating involvement in Syria. The general outlines of this CIA effort have been reported. One fact which has not been highlighted is that the U.N. arms embargo of Libya, which the United States helped pass in 2011, makes shipping weapons in or out of the country a violation of international law. Indeed, the way the U.N. resolution is written, even knowingly allowing such shipments to take place may be a violation of the agreement. I want to add parenthetically here that some of our concerns with having a world court and international tribunals that have jurisdiction over American citizens is that they may have laws that they decide to enforce that are against or outside what our United States Constitution allows. I would submit that American individuals, whether they're CIA agents or military, should be accountable to the United States and under the United States Constitution and not some world court. And it should be worth noting that as this administration pushed U.N. resolutions--I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is, but if individuals within this administration then violated the international law that they pushed to create, then they probably need to be careful when they're traveling in years after they leave the White House or the administration efforts because, who knows, you might get an indictment somewhere in one of these international tribunals that you violated the U.N. law you passed. You got guns into or out of Libya, you violated the law. People in this country need to understand that participating in the making of laws and that participating in the violation of laws have consequences. This article continues: In 2012, the Obama administration publicly claimed it was working on diplomatic and humanitarian responses to the situation in Syria. But behind the scenes, the United States was aware that a network of arms shipments was being created to support the rebels. This network involved shipping weapons from Qatar and, later, Libya to Turkey where they could be taken across the border and distributed to militia in Syria. In June of 2012, The New York Times reported that a contingent of CIA agents were ``operating secretly'' in Turkey to help vet which groups would receive these weapons. But later reporting by the Times would indicate the CIA was doing more than vetting. {time} 1330 The article goes on down and mentions that The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, this was back in June, that: The Central Intelligence Agency has begun moving weapons to Jordan from a network of secret warehouses and plans to start arming small groups of vetted Syrian rebels within a month, expanding U.S. support of moderate forces battling President Bashar al-Assad, according to diplomats and U.S. officials briefed on the plans. To sum up, the CIA encouraged the creation of a multinational arms pipeline, helped shop for weapons to fill it, vetted the groups who would receive those weapons in Syria and, since June of 2013, contributed U.S. weapons to the mix. With that backdrop in place, we can now return our attention to Libya. During the U.S. involvement in overthrowing Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi during 2011, the Obama administration became aware that shipments of weapons were making their way to Qadhafi's troops, allowing them to resupply themselves and pose a greater threat to civilians. I might add parenthetically that with Qadhafi, that Qadhafi was an ally of this administration and this country at the time, that this administration chose to destroy and help remove. The article says: So in February the U.S. and other allied nations including the U.K. and France pushed for a package of international sanctions which became U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970. Resolution 1970 condemned the bombing of civilians, imposed travel restrictions on Qadhafi and his inner circle, froze assets and, importantly, banned any transfer of arms to or from Libya. In addition, Resolution 917 requires member states, upon discovery of such arms, to destroy them. A second resolution, number 1973, was passed a month later in March 2011. It created a no-fly zone and reaffirmed that member states were expected to help enforce the embargo by inspecting any sea or air vessels believed to be shipping weapons to or from Libya. If discovered, such weapons were to be destroyed. But despite Resolution 1970, The New York Times reported in April 2011 that shipments of arms were reaching Libyan rebels from Qatar. Another in-depth story published in December 2012 describes how the U.S. winked at these shipments despite concerns that some weapons were falling into the hands of extremists. Parenthetically, I might insert, duh. The article goes on: In fact, the nature of our military strategy in Libya made partnering with Qatar necessary. The Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into another quagmire in the Middle East. As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United States. After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the Obama administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to two former administration officials briefed on the talks. ``The UAE was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,'' said one former official. ``We told them it's okay to ship other weapons.'' But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the Emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the Emirates, American officials said. Again, that would be a direct violation of the U.N. resolution that we helped pushed into international law. The article says: This pattern of winking at violation of the U.N. arms embargo of Libya was repeated after Qadhafi's ouster. With the war in Libya at an end and the one in Syria ramping up, the direction of the arms pipeline simply reversed itself. Whereas weapons had been coming into Libya from Qatar, they now headed out of Libya back to Qatar and from there on to either Mali or Syria by way of Turkey. A June 21, 2013 New York Times story points out that local militias were organizing these shipments--including flights this year from Tripoli and Benghazi. But these shipments out of Libya are said to have been taking place for a year, beginning several months before the 9/11 attack in Benghazi-- that killed these four American patriots. To sum up, the U.S. approved and cleared a path for a pipeline of weapons into Libya during the revolution in 2011. That pipeline would eventually reverse course to provide the same spare weapons to rebel in Syria. Both efforts seem to violate the U.N. resolutions which the United States helped pass in early 2011. But late in 2011 the United States realized its revolution on the cheap in Libya had a worrisome downside. Thousands of dangerous anti-aircraft weapons were loose in Libya, attracting militants who might wish to use them to commit terrorist acts against civilian air traffic. Something had to be done. So the article goes on to talk about how we sent people into Libya to try to reclaim the weapons that we had helped provide, including surface-to-air missiles. The article says: A month later, just three days after the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, the Times of London reported that a Libyan ship carrying 400 tons of weapons, including SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles, docked in Turkey. This was the largest known shipment of weapons to Syria at the time. The ship's captain, Omar Mousaeeb, was from Benghazi. The article goes on to make light of the allegation that this is a phony scandal. If it's so phony, why is there so much in the way of effort to keep Congress from knowing what really happened? Reports have been that we have CIA agents with direct knowledge of what happened during the death of our four patriots. They are being polygraphed every 30 days to keep them quiet, and demanding to know if anyone has leaked any information to Congress or the media because this administration is doing absolutely everything they can to keep us from getting to the truth of what happened there. And I have been greatly encouraged this week, and in a trip to the Middle East, where, over the safety and the future of the United States, people in a bipartisan way were very concerned about our involvement in Syria, that we should not get involved in Syria, that it would be a huge mistake. Some say Members of Congress should never travel outside their district or Washington, D.C., but what I have seen, and especially from a trip to the Middle East last week, we're not getting the straight information from this administration. If we want to know what's [[Page H5545]] really going on, where we are appropriating money, where we are making policy through our control of the purse strings--or lack of control-- we've got to go to those areas and talk to the leaders involved. It's amazing what you find out. When leaders of allied countries tell us we don't understand you, what you are doing. Do you not know you went to war in Afghanistan for the Muslim Brotherhood--against the Muslim Brotherhood? There you were fighting the Taliban, and then you go to Libya, and--well, first to Egypt. We have helped the Muslim Brotherhood in the wrong places, and it needs to stop in Syria as well. With that, I yield back the balance of my time. ____________________